[vonklaus]

Ok, this seems interesting. However, unless I am misunderstanding this, of the large table they used for the bulk of the articles content they only showed 6 features under utilized.

Obviously, we could prune the execution of some of the JS which is backwards compatible to the early 90s, and some of the html which is based on IBMs 1960s.

My super high-level first pass optimization rec for the w3c: If a feature exists for 3 years and a random sampling of 100,000 websites has usage stats of less than < 1% it is automatically deprecated. If it is >1% but less than 5%, it is automatically phased out in 2 years of the spec.

[pilom]

Unfortunately this would create a huge disincentive for developers to use any new features no matter how compelling. Would you learn any new features if there was a chance in 2 years all of your users would drop support for it?

[vonklaus]

That was the point. If a feature wasn't great enough to inspire 1 out of 20 developers to experiment with it, then I don't think it makes sense.

[franciscop]

1. Retrocompatibility. It's impossible to assume that 99% of the users are using a modern browser with under 3 years.

2. We are not talking about experimentation, we are talking about deployment into production.

[vonklaus]

I agree with you. I was certainly t aggressive in time frame, but I still agree with the sentiment. We shouldn't have failed decade old features in a browser. As to point 1, you are correct and this is certainly true, however I wish it werent. I assume everyone on hacker news has either gone to college or is aware that a presedential term is 4 years long. Consider how much you as person changed in those 4 years, consider how much the world changed during a 4 year presedential term. China as a country sets guidance for itself, directly for its billion people, and indirectly for the rest of the world, on a rolling 5 yeat basis. I would like to challenge users (and enerprises) to upgrade their browsers over this timeframe and spend the multitude of seconds this takes them to not only increase their own well being, but the well being of developers writing the software they consume.

[franciscop]

Consider the Jquery 3.0 that is launching now. It supports Internet Explorer 8, a browser released over 7 years ago [1]. Using jquery means, for example, you won't be using FormData for submitting forms. Heck, you won't even be using `.forEach()` on arrays.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8